5:21 a.m. 63 degrees, wind ENE 1 mph. Sky: a flat white with a hint of peach; the air thick with wretched humidity; no separation between ground and sky, everything and everywhere marinating in fog. Permanent streams: current slowing but still babbling. Intermittent streams: a trickle and puddles. Wetlands: shrouded in fog; visibility reduced to halfway across; it looks like the film set for the remake of The Creature From the Black Lagoon. I can't see the mid-marsh snag, the red-shouldered hawk's post; if a pterodactyl perched there, I wouldn't know it. Pond: birthplace of mist.
DOR: a lousy night for green frogs, which scatter in huddled wreckage; one adult, and four recently transformed tadpoles out for a fatal evening ramble.
AOR: a pair of robins, always robins. Flattened frogs don't interest them.
The musical fabric of the neighborhood: Four white-breasted nuthatches on the trunk of white pine and a small crowd of chickadees in hemlocks. Can autumn be far off? Out of the interior of fog, a red-shouldered hawk screams, and a barred owl barks. An alder flycatcher, the first I've heard in a month, an ascending rrrep, rrrep; sounds like angry phoebe. A yellow-billed cuckoo, a soft, hollow note repeated at intervals, suggests the call of an America bittern wearing a face mask.
Two tanagers, hidden in leaves and fog, sing in the oaks, a series of hoarse and raspy phrases over and over. Pack-a-day songbirds that make similarly patterned robins sound like Sam Cooke. One last look before they leave; one glimpse of an indescribable red, set off by coal-black wings . . . that's all I want—one sublime espy before the color drains.
A clique of loquacious jays, ten or twelve, a mishpocha on a Sunday outing in pines and streamside maples. Fog and jays; morsels of October in bowels of summer. They don't seem to be feeding. Just chasing each other around like kids on a playground, a wild troop of blue jays enlivens an otherwise quiet morning that remains as motionless as fog.
Three red-eyed vireos by the lower permanent stream engaged in a cloying battle royale, each bird singing a phrase every couple of seconds, stupefyingly repetitive. Here-I-am, up-in-the-tree, here-I-am. The dullest of musical messengers, ho-hum songbirds but feathered metronomes, all the same, which set to music the beat of the Earth, the spin of a summer that ineluctably drifts toward autumn.
In the meantime, I have more raspberries than I know what to do with.
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